As technology continues to pervade all aspects of life, museums that have not embraced technology have struggled to remain relevant to the communities they serve. Accordingly, museums are trying to find ways to incorporate technology to enhance the experience for their visitors.
Some museums have turned to technology to meet the needs of a generation that expects to access information through their home computers, store it on their personal computing/memory devices such as MP3 players, and “own” resources in non-traditional ways. For example, visitors to the Library of Congress database online can access multimedia exhibitions, find and download maps, retrieve archival collections information, and view films. Texas Tech University offers the Vietnam Project through a website where veterans are encouraged to access a questionnaire as a prelude to an interview, which, when taped, becomes part of the Virtual Vietnam Archives, where cyber visitors can read a transcript or listen to streaming audio. In the for-profit sector, the History Factory, a heritage management firm, assists corporations, organizations, and institutions discover, preserve, and leverage their history to meet present business challenges. With assistance from the History Factory, organizations can capture the history that gives the organizations their character; uncovering moments of motivation and inspiration that can help define a competitive advantage. The History Factory's products include websites, exhibitions, history books, and integrated anniversary programs.
While much has been done to involve the public with museum work through interactive digital experiences, barriers between personal and public history remain. For example, while technology allows for a delivery system that appeals to the current generation and provides greater opportunities for interaction and choice, the museum still controls the information and the interpretation. Moreover, while visitors can choose items from the collections, they cannot effectively merge their own archival materials with the museum artifacts, nor can they imbed their own exhibition into anything larger. The product that visitors create from museum resources remains static and isolated from the larger work of the museum. Accordingly, museums are seeking to collaborate with their community to collect and incorporate personal narratives that are relevant to the history that the museums seek to preserve. In the media and digital age we now live, moments and events can be captured instantaneously and digitally uploaded to computers and social media sites (such as Facebook or YouTube). The context of the new digital media and how material interrelates and supplements previous historical artifacts provides an opportunity to create museum systems that extend outside the traditional “four” walls.
While the formal facade of a museum and its history of authority can impose barriers to such collaboration, the “virtual” landscape made available through information technology has provided relevance in other contexts. For example, Wikipedia plays an important role in creating an interactive field for the exchange of knowledge, which is generated in a form of conversation rather than “received from on high.” While it may lack the authority of well-established encyclopedias such as Britannica, Wikipedia still engages the public in an active process of sharing—and assessing—knowledge.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a strong need for museum systems and methods that remove barriers between personal and public history and facilitate seamless interaction between museum visitors, actual museum experiences, personal experiences and online museum experiences. The systems and methods described herein provide these and other advantageous results.